Accessing the Internet - Offline

Note : this article first appeared on evolt.org. Most of the content is identical except for some grammatical & markup differences.

Disclaimer

Before I begin I am not even sure if this article is very relevant to many people accessing this site. Let me explain why, I gather that most people have access to high speed / steady connections, well this article would be more relevant to people not having the above, in some cases not even having access to the Internet.

Introduction

I am going to mention some ways to browse the Internet using just plain and simple e-mail.
Why is this relevant to me?

• I live in a land of slow Internet connectivity forget about Internet, I am freaking lucky if I am able to get a dial tone from my phone.
• On a very sunny day, with blessings of all the holy men around, I would be really privileged to connect at 33.6 over a telephone line.
• Did you mention cable modems? Dude, we don't have cable TV.

A brief digression

I have this good lady friend who works for a relief organisation in southern Sudan.
(I hope everybody knows where Sudan is, I know: they are my neighbours) She is mostly on the field, and her organisation has provided fairly decent equipment. Their field office has some radio equipment, and my friend has some weird proprietary software that allows her to access email over a wireless radio. They have got this and a radio satellite phone that fits in a suitcase but is bloody expensive to use.
This is about the only way they've got to communicate to the outside world.

My friend is from Swaziland, she sometimes has to be in the field for quite a long time, so she loses track of all the happenings, news, sports et al. in Swaziland.
What's she to do now?

The web via email

As any decent friend would do (;-)) I offered to help her out.

If I send an email to :
agora@dna.affrc.go.jp
with no subject , and this in the body of the email :
SEND http://news.google.com/news?q=swaziland

After a while I receive this reply :
This mail is not a spam but the automatic reply to your mail;
From: yourmail@yourmail.com
To: agora@dna.affrc.go.jp
Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 12:38:33 +0300
---------------------------

After this I get the whole html results page from google news for the keyword: swaziland in text form with all the hrefs below it, allowing me to make further requests if needed via email

What I had basically done was, send the http://news.google.com search string to a mail robot, which browsed then download, then emailed the page back to me.

What if I wanted not just a single page but also all the pages pointed to by that page?

No problem, the agora service has a command called DEEP.

For instance if I send: DEEP http://www.cnn.com

The service would send me the first page i.e. www.cnn.com and also all the content of the pages which link from cnn.com. There are quite a few powerful commands like this, which I will not go into. To get detailed info about all the agora services commands send an email to agora@dna.affrc.go.jp, with WWW in the body of the email.

Other services

My good lady friend used agora for a while, but she found a page referring to a pdf document on a web page that she wanted to see very much, again she looked to me for help.

The www4mail service

If I send an email to: www4mail@wm.ictp.trieste.it ,
With this in the body:
http://www.undp.org/dpa/publications/xyz.pdf
After a while I receive the file xyz.pdf back as a file by email.

This service also sends back HTML files, if I sent the same google news search URL to the www4mail service, it sends me back the search results page as an HTML file

FTP via email

There used be quite a few services available around a year ago, especially one called BITFTP , sadly most of them seem to have met their demise, and I couldn't find any working services.

Conclusion

So my friend is happy, which means I am happy, and on this pleasant note, let me finish.

I have provided links to some sites, which provide information on these offline services. The service locations that I mentioned above are not the only ones in existence. These services are free, there are also some services which do this for $$$$, I didn't mention them. The response time for some these services is not instant (takes a few hours sometimes), and sometimes they do not work at all. So use them wisely.

Related sites

www4mail service home page & user manual This also has a list of currently active www4 services
Discussion group on www4mail This is a list maintained on the w3.org website
Accessing the internet via email- a FAQ by G.E.Boyd Slightly outdated though but still relevant, many of the listed services are offline